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CONGO: THE WAR WITHOUT BATTLES
By Gary Brecher Writing up the Congo is like dying: you have to deal with it sooner or later, but you're not looking forward to it. I've tried to get out of talking about Congo every way I could, but the time has come. It's just too big and bloody a mess for an honest war-fan to ignore. Nobody knows exactly how many people have been slaughtered in Congo over the past few years, but the BBC estimates 2.5 million. That's a lot of zeroes, a lot of bodies - especially for a war without battles. These people didn't die in the trenches. They died African-style: chopped to death with machetes, mowed down by squads of stoned twelve-year-olds, or just driven into the bush to die of hunger or malaria. [picture] UPC troops There's this term for what's going on in the Congo: "Primitive Warfare." It doesn't mean simple weapons or illiterate soldiers. It means the way people fought before there were any nation states. It's not pretty. It means avoiding combat, slinking around looking for unguarded villages, and then going in and killing everybody in the place, except a few you think you can sell at the nearest slave market. "Ethnic cleansing" is just a soft word for primitive warfare. It's always been the way people fight. I once took a first-year course in "World Literature" at SCS - it was required - and I pissed off the professor good when he had us read a piece of the Iliad. It was about Achilles fighting with Agamemnon about a slave girl, and I just said, "Hey, that's just the way they fight in Africa right now!" He made me pay for that, the PC bastard. Naturally he was white, and naturally he made a big speech that had "racism" in it about a hundred times - you know, looking around at all the "people of color" in the room to make sure nobody was going to turn him in. But I wasn't being racist at all, he was. And I still say if people thought about Congo when they were reading "Classics" they'd understand it better. Achilles raids a village, grabs the best-looking girl, moves on to ambush another village. In the meantime one of Achilles's friends, some other ganja-smoking kid with an AK, decides he wants the girl instead. They settle it out in the bush somewhere. Boom: that's the Iliad. But damn it, the one thing people don't want to do is connect the Classics with war, Congo style-"primitive warfare." First thing: borders. In primitive warfare there are no borders. You know, these spoiled "Anarchy" kids who like to draw a big "A" in a circle, they talk about "no borders" like it's a good thing. You think so? Go to Africa. Congo isn't really a country at all. It's lines on a map. The lines were drawn up by European colonizers at Berlin in 1884-5. Most of the people at the table, the men chopping up Africa, had never even been there. They didn't know or care about tribal boundaries, they were just playing politics. The Congo borders got defined by where the colonies around it ended. It wasn't worth much back then, so they let King Leopold of Belgium take it. I mean, for himself. Private property. The whole frickin' country. A few years after they gave Leopold the country, rubber got big. Suddenly Leopold's jungle was worth something, and he pushed his luck as far as he could - drafted every thug he could get in Europe or Africa to go in there and break heads to make sure the rubber quota was filled. Leopold was what you call a bottom-line guy. His goons had this habit of chopping off hands when people were slow getting their rubber. Maybe that sounds familiar? You may remember a lunatic named Foday Sankoh, up in Sierra Leone, who told his "soldiers" to chop off hands and feet to keep villagers in line. Maybe you think that's just the Africans being primitive, but it was the cute li'l Belgians who showed'em how. Look at Central Africa with the borders erased. Hundreds of tribes, overlapping districts like Bosnia. Worse still, some of the tribes have millions of people and others amount to some schmo and his cousin and their dog. Not exactly nation-building material, even if the fucking Europeans had had the decency to leave them alone. The tribe that gave Congo its name, the baKongo, don't even live in Congo - most of them are down south in Angola, where they were one side of the big triangular US/Soviet proxy war they had in the 70s. There are at least 280 tribes in the Congo, and the dense rain forest means most are pretty small, isolated groups. A lot of African countries got lucky when independence came in the 60s. Either there was one dominant tribe covering most of the country, or there'd been a century or so of "civilization" that built some sort of educated class who were ready to take over. Congo didn't have either. Leopold hadn't even bothered to teach the Congolese a thing. He just wanted the rubber - or the hands. Most of the country was thick jungle, with the river the only way to travel. [picture] Lt. Col. Freddy Ngalimo (MLC) The biggest, strongest tribes in Central Africa were the Hutu and the Tutsi, who were based in Rwanda and Burundi. They ended up in power over various parts of Congo at the end of the century just because nobody in Congo had the organization. The Hutu and the Tutsi are real law-abiding, organized people. If you've only heard about them from the genocide news out of Rwanda, that might seem surprising. But...well, to understand this you have to be willing to tell the bitter truth. And here it is: the people who do genocide best are law-abiding, decent, stand-up folks. Strange but true. Take the Germans: wouldn't hurt a fly...unless someone in uniform told them to. Then they would fry every fly on the planet. The Tutsi and Hutu had been lucky - in a way. The European colonists liked hanging out in the Hutu and Tutsis' homelands, Rwanda and Burundi - cool mountain air, fertile volcanic soil. And they liked these two intelligent, obedient tribes. So they, um, "civilized" them. The Hutu and Tutsi turned into the most literate, Christian, tidy, hard-working people in Central Africa. Then the Europeans overseers left...and after a little while these two tribes get that old itch to wipe each other out. It was all organized. The churches helped out. Two of the big war criminals were nuns. It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, imagining hundreds of thousands of neat, clean Hutus with machetes running around cheerfully hacking every Tutsi or Tutsi-lover they catch. The old line, "I was just following orders," may seem pretty lame, but after you read about the Hutu killers you end up kind of believing it. They did it because they were told to. Rwanda and Burundi are two small, heavily-populated countries due east of Congo - so you could guess their well-trained killers might be looking west and getting excited. Meanwhile, who was running the store in Congo? Bad news: it was a corrupt, superstitious, stupid, dying old jerk-off named Mobutu - a guy only a CIA bagman could love. (We can really pick'em, all right!) With Mobutu in charge, Congo wasn't a country, it was a racket. You always hear reporters jabbering about what a shame it is that, "...with all its mineral riches and natural wealth," Congo is still a hellhole. Well, with leaders like Mobutu, Heaven would be a hellhole in no time. He knew how to do two things: steal, and play one tribe against another. That was all he needed to stay in power for life - meaning until '97, when the bastard finally died. Under Mobutu, Congo was officially "at peace." Which meant it was small-scale stuff, murder and torture, instead of big armies. It'd be a lie to call that "Peace," but it kept Congo out of the headlines. When "war" came, it was thanks to that dynamic duo, the Tutsis and the Hutus. Congo was too fucked up to have a war by itself. To have a war, you need organization. Soldiers who obey orders. Lines of communication. The only people in the neighborhood who had what it took to make a war were...you guessed it! Those Hatfields'n'McCoys of Central Africa: the Hutus and the Tutsis! The bloodbath really got going in the early 90s, after a suspicious plane crash that killed the leaders of Rwanda and Burundi. The Rwandan Hutus polished up their machetes and started killing Tutsi. Maybe a million or so. Only then did the feud spill over into that big stinking power vacuum to the west: Congo. One thing you notice about African bush wars: when one side is pushed to the edge of extinction, it can strike back against the enemy's soldiers, who aren't as willing to die. This happened in Uganda, in the Lowery Triangle (see my Uganda column), and it happened in Rwanda. The Tutsi had nothing left to lose, and they started retaking the country. The Hutu, who'd been so brave when it was a matter of chopping kids' heads open like coconuts, weren't so brave going up against real soldiers. They lit out for the jungle - for Congo. The Tutsis' new army pursued, and realized it had marched into the biggest power vacuum since Gerald Ford got sucked into Nixon's slipstream. There was just nobody to stop them. Mobutu had never wanted or allowed any power in Congo other than him. Now that he was dead, there was nobody at all. Mobutu had an old enemy, Laurent Kabila, who'd been hiding out in the bush preaching rebellion for decades, getting exactly nowhere. Kabila wasn't classic hero-rebel stuff. He was a fat man, for one thing. They always mention that in the wire stories, like getting fat is the biggest sin anybody could ever commit. Pisses me off. Us fat people have dreams too, you know. You know the saddest thing about being fat? Having some kind of heroic daydream, then suddenly seeing your reflection in a window or mirror. Suddenly you realize whoa, I'm not entitled to dream about that stuff. [picture] Jean Pierre Bemba (MLC) Well, to be fair, fat old Kabila wasn't very heroic by anybody's standards. Just another killer/thief with a taste for chorus girls and a history of ivory-poaching and gem-smuggling. But in the waste of Congo, Kabila was the closest thing to new blood you could find. When Mobutu saw how the Tutsi revenge strike just kept moving west toward the capital, Kinshasa, without meeting any armed opposition, he suddenly saw the light. After thirty years of preaching Maoism, Kabila started talking free enterprise. And even though he was from the Luba tribe, he became a born-again Tutsi for the duration. Nobody, not even Kabila, expected this ragged little army to make it all the way to Kinshasa. But they did. Kabila was so shocked he had no idea what to do next. Then it came to him, the traditional Central African formula: embezzle, lie, and murder your enemies! One of the fat man's bodyguards got sick of it and shot Kabila dead in January 2001. Kabila's worthless son Joseph took over for his worthless dad. The Tutsis' brief period of clear-headed soldierly discipline was over. Hell broke loose, on cue, back in the homelands of Rwanda and Burundi. Every Cub Scout Pack in Congo declared itself a Liberation Movement and declared its independence. In December 2002 the CIA dragged all the camo-wearing generals together, and all the crazy gangs in Congo signed a peace pact. Last time I checked, every party was accusing of everybody else of violating the agreement. Now there's a surprise: a Congo peace deal breaking down. Who could have guessed? You wonder why the Foreign Service types even bother setting these conferences up. Who's kidding who? Just figuring out who's who in this boneyard rumble is impossible. As near as I can tell, here are some of the factions: The Mai-Mai: my personal faves. Hicks with bows and arrows. They believe charms make them immune to bullets. Funny how that notion hangs on. MLC: run by a big Congo businessman. Imagine if Ross Perot had his own army. They're backed by Uganda and call the shots in most of northern Congo. RCD-Goma: this group is based, not so surprisingly, in Goma. They're Rwandan, originally, and run a big swathe of Eastern Congo. There it is, friends. Not a pretty picture. Remember what I said about borders? At the moment, there is no Congo. Uganda runs the North, Rwanda the East, Angola the south, and a bunch of stone-age loonies stalk around the backwoods bushwhacking anybody they think they can overpower. Meanwhile a few thugs in Mercedes tool around Kinshasa running over stray corpses. Now you know why I didn't want to talk about the place. The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
